"King on a field of corpses"

Mark Steyn writes,

St Elijah's monastery stood on the outskirts of Mosul for 1,400 years, the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq. We learned on Wednesday that it has been razed to the ground by the Islamic State:

"Bulldozers, heavy equipment, sledgehammers, possibly explosives turned those stone walls into this field of gray-white dust. They destroyed it completely," [Stephen Wood] said from his Colorado offices.

On the other side of the world, in his office in exile, in Erbil, Iraq, Catholic priest Rev. Paul Thabit Habib, 39, stared in disbelief at the before- and after- images.

"Our Christian history in Mosul is being barbarically leveled," he said in Arabic.

In my book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, I write of the ethno-religious cleansing of the formerly "diverse" Middle East over the last half-century and describe Islam as "king on a field of corpses". Even so, very few of the shock troops of Muslim totalitarianism have taken that phrase as literally as ISIS does. If you "degrade" and "contain" the Islamic State in as desultory and lethargic a fashion as Obama does, there will be nothing left to liberate - other than a vast "field of gray-white dust".

I doubt one in a thousand westerners knows the fate of St Elijah's. To the fatuous social-justice pontiff who sits in St Peter's, it's not as big a deal as climate change. It's not a big story on the network news - it might embarrass the "leader of the free world", and complicate the narrative for a Secretary of State running on her immense foreign-policy experience. Christianity in Araby is being "barbarically leveled", and yet the President in his already forgotten State of the Union can only confirm Islam in its indestructible, pathological sense of its own victimhood:

His Holiness, Pope Francis, told this body from the very spot that I'm standing on tonight that "to imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place." When politicians insult Muslims, whether abroad or our fellow citizens, when a mosque is vandalized, or a kid is called names, that doesn't make us safer. That's not telling it like it is. It's just wrong. (Applause.) It diminishes us in the eyes of the world. It makes it harder to achieve our goals. It betrays who we are as a country. (Applause.)

No, sir. That "field of gray-white dust" in Iraq betrays who we are, all too tellingly.